Surprised To See Me At Work

This is what our undesignated roadway looks like right now.

We started the day with a good snowstorm. Francine had to be in town and Sheldon was brought along for some muscle to help her because they were going to ditch me there. Schools were closed and I half expected everything to be closed. I hadn't gotten a call from work telling me not to come in though.

Bundled up for the trek we waded through the snow to our minivan a half kilometre away. It didn't look promising. Even though the snow was quite fluffy it was pretty deep. I brought the snow shovel. In a worst case scenario we would turn around and come home.

When we got to the road, it of course was not yet ploughed. I wanted to try partly because I hadn't driven our current van in this kind of weather yet. I wanted to see if it handled better or worse than our previous ride. The drifts didn't look insurmountable.

Francine let me drive. I backed her out and then rammed forward. We weren't more than a couple hundred metres from our parking spot when we hit our first drift. Whumpf and we had to stop because we couldn't see anything. Big pile of snow on the hood that had to be cleared before proceeding. Good news was that we'd gotten all the way through to the other side. Snow was still up to the bumper though. I spun the tires trying to get some momentum. That's the point I discovered the one thing I liked better with our old minivan. Spinning the tires on this one dumps all the snow on the windshield.

Visibility was horrible, before getting to the main road we had to stop something like five times to clear snow away from the wipers because they were getting stuck. In spite of the conditions we made good progress and I managed to keep us safely between the ditches. It's about six kilometres to that point. Once we made it to the main road we were home free. The plough had been through there and as long as I kept the speed down there were no other problems.

Francine's destination turned out to be closed but my place of employment were astonished but happy to see me (they know where we live). A lot of people couldn't get in (or said they couldn't) and they had me start early to help fill in. Francine and Sheldon hung out for awhile so that the ploughs would be done their work. She didn't want to try to match me by driving back through all that.

Hopefully this will be the worst storm of the whole season. I'm not likely to be able to drive through anything worse and I can't really afford to lose time at work. The old minivan wouldn't have made it through this one.